The town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, where the novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner spent six  years of his childhood, has long been a base for hunters setting out in pursuit of antelope, mule deer and whitetail. More recently, thanks to the discovery in 1991 of a skeleton of a Tyrannosauraus rex, the best-preserved specimen in Canada, it has also become the centre of “dino country”. It  was “pater-ontology” — a need to separate her father from the myths that surrounded him — rather than palaeontology that took Leona Theis there. In trying to unearth him, she paints a lovely portrait of the place.